Wavefront manipulations have enabled wide applications across many interdisciplinary fields ranging from optics and microwaves to acoustics. However, the realizations of such functional surfaces heavily rely on micro/nanofabrication to define the structured surfaces, which are fixed and only work within a limited spectrum. To address these issues, previous attempts combining tunable materials like liquid crystal or phase-change ones onto the metasurfaces have permitted extra tunability and working spectra, however, these additional layers bring in inevitable loss and complicate the fabrication. Here we demonstrate a fabrication-free tunable flat slab using a nonlinear four-wave mixing process. By wavefront-shaping the pump onto the flat slab, we can successfully tune the effective nonlinear refraction angle of the emitting FWM beams according to the phase-matching condition. In this manner, a focusing and a defocusing nonlinear of FWM beam through the flat slab have been demonstrated with a converging and a diverging pump wavefronts, respectively. Furthermore, a beam steering scheme over a 20° angle has been realized through a non-degenerate four-wave mixing process by introducing a second pump. These features open up a door to manipulating light propagation in an all-optical manner, paving the way to more functional and tunable flat slab devices in the applications of imaging and all-optical information.
© 2023. The Author(s).